Freightdog wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2023 9:40 pm A couple of items popped up in that last post.

Stairs- treads and risers dimensions don’t appear to be a concern, here. More than a few places, the risers are inconsistent height, making negotiation interesting in blackouts, and stair angles a little too steep, with treads sized for 8yr old feet.

Bathroom drains. In our current apartment, I think the upper floor bathroom drain is a high point, making the bathroom a vapour trap. I keep meaning to poor some napalm down the drains to see if I can clear out whatever seems to have crawled in and died.


Dummy question-
Electrical standards seem to be rather lacking on the whole. Is this apathy, corruption, a combination, or an actual genuine lack of any meaningful standard set by the department of putting stuff up?
I got dragged into a sideline consulting thing last year, in Nigeria. Outright corruption means that standards are simply ignored subject to whatever is in the envelope. They do have a proper building code, and proper electrical codes, albeit somewhat last century, but British Standards, all the same. They’re just a guide to how far people have deviated when they start counting the bodies.

phuketrichard wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2023 8:18 am MY observation, Khmers take no pride in their work or others work:

Marx wrote: ↑Sun Feb 19, 2023 11:57 am We are currently entering negotiations with a contractor to build ourselves a restaurant, guest house and two apartments on a 210 m² riverside plot. Unlike others here, my experience of building in Cambodia has been very positive to date. My finished projects include a 5 ha resort, a kindergarten for 120 children, an NGO HQ and a teacher training school on the National Institute of Education campus. It helps a lot to actually know what you're doing when you design something that's buildable in this country, I'm an engineer, and it helps immensely if you've been introduced to Cambodian construction and contracting by people who understand its special characteristics. NGOs who've delivered school buildings to tight specifications and budgets over the last decades are a good training ground. If you have neither the expertise nor the experience, you can either buy it, or choose to progress without - as most here seemingly have done- and, if you take the latter route, then there's really no grounds to single out 'Cambodia' as the reason for the several possibly expensive disappointments that you are subsequently likely to experience. Simply relying on a contractor is unwise here or almost anywhere, unless perhaps you buy an 'off-the-peg' building, which many Khmer people do.

Our building has 400 m² gross floor area, spread over 3 storeys, the middle storey a 'half-floor' mezzanine, typical for the country. It's been a fairly full-time job for seven months to design it, get the required engineer's stamp (I'm not registered in Cambodia), get a building permit and a priced bill of quantities for the negotiation. The outlay so far - apart from my time and the land - is around $1,500, which I call a result. I don't know that I could have done it any faster and still kept my wife fully on board with the project.

I'd be very interested in the experience of others, except perhaps if this experience is of the 'everything here is crap' nature, which is unhelpful and boring.

Grand Barong wrote: ↑Wed Feb 22, 2023 8:31 pm
Share some photo's of your builds?
What is the name of the resort & where is it? (if you don't mind) it sounds interesting & would make a great topic.


I was part of the on-site team that delivered phase 1 of Hanchey Bamboo Resort (HBR), it's 25 km north of Kampong Cham city. Financed through the Swiss agency Ecosolidar, and built by the NGO 'Buddhism for Social Development Action' (BSDA), phase 1 included an 80 seat restaurant, a meditation hall, a kitchen, a swimming pool, 10 bungalows, a dormitory, a staff house, roads, electrical, mechanical and sanitary infrastructure and landscape. Subsequent to phase 1, a conference centre and a further 10 bungalows have been added.

HBR is interesting on several counts:
It's a social enterprise project, meaning that aid is made available to start a business whose profits are then ploughed back to the recipient. This is intended to reduce 'aid dependency', as the business cuts itself loose from donors.
BSDA runs a children's home, the Resort is used to provide job training for them in gastronomy and hotel management. Many children who came to BSDA from positions of extreme disadvantage have passed through HBR to obtain worthwhile jobs throughout the Kingdom.
HBR was built entirely by local labour. This was a strategic decision, taken to ensure that money flowed into the local communities, rather than being creamed off as profit elsewhere. Labourers were all offered on-the-job specialist training. Many moved on to well-paid work elsewhere in the Kingdom, rather than returning to day-labouring in Thailand. At the peak period a community of 40+ workers and their families were living on site.
HBR was built using bamboo and earth building techniques, with raw materials obtained within a 20 km radius of the site. Its carbon footprint is exceptionally low, its capacity for end-of-lifespan recycling very high.